Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom are rightly seen as representatives of a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, their interpretations diverge due to different definitions and uses of conceptions of discursive practice. We focus on three ways in which such definitions and uses bear on their interpretations. First, while Lumsden has recently criticized Pinkard and Brandom for ‘discursive bias’ in their accounts of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we note that Pinkard distinguishes between various modes (...) of reason-giving, and we argue that a further qualification of interdependencies between these modes may support his interpretation against such criticism. Second, Pinkard and Pippin have recently criticized Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping practice, and Pippin in particular has argued that the latter rests on an individualistic reductionism about content foreign to Hegel. However, we find that the real issue is that the modes of methodological abstraction and idealization assumed for Brandom’s conception of discursive practice leave out of account the historical alteration as well as the institutional embodiment of normative authority as emphasized by Pippin and Pinkard. Third, while Pippin and Pinkard both make Hegel’s notion of modern ethical life bear on a conception of practical rationality, their uses of a conception of discursive practice in such an undertaking betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents. (shrink)

I dispute a widespread contrast between the sciences and the humanities that undervalues the latter compared to the former. This contrast assumes that science is more valuable than the humanities because it is more useful, an assumption I reject on the grounds that science is not more useful than the humanities and the value of usefulness, being instrumental, depends on the non-instrumental value of what it's usefulness for. I conclude that science is not made more valuable than the humanities either (...) by its instrumental or by its non-instrumental value. (shrink)

In this paper I individuate and analyse a new type of epistemic injustice that can arise in education and depends on the so-called ‘backtracking fallacy’ in student assessment, which occurs when a teacher confuses (or does not distinguish between) the logical dimension of a framework of disciplinary concepts and its psychological dimension. I will also touch upon a different type of social injustice that might transpire in education. I suggest that familiarity with Paul Hirst's view of liberal education, which presupposes (...) a neat distinction between a public framework of knowledge and the psychological process of gradually learning it, can contribute to prevent or reduce both forms of injustice. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to compare traditional multiculturalist political theory with a new paradigm in which the usual strategies for dealing with cultural diversities are replaced by the tools provided by inferential semantics as developed by Robert Brandom. The upshot is the transition from a landscape which is highly demanding with respect to the common assumptions among different views of the world to a dialogical context in which contrasting beliefs can come to light more freely.

In this article I discuss the primacy that, following Sellars, Robert Brandom ascribes to the intersubjective and discursive space of reasons over all other processes in which the human mind is involved. I will compare Brandom’s perspective with that of the situated approach to the study of mind. At first, my aim is to show that the origin of intentionality has to be found in the sphere of sentience and the living body. Second, by comparing the enactivist account of language (...) that derives from the naturalization of Husserl’s phenomenology with the neo-pragmatist approach to the linguistic turn, I argue for a heuristic primacy owing to the linguistic practice of giving and asking for reasons. This allows me to reflect with a meta-philosophical approach on to what extent two families of views such as pragmatism and phenomenology, with their different variants, interact in the attempt to blend things together, i.e., nature and culture; mind and world; and what happens inside the human body and what happens outside it. (shrink)

According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been (...) given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception. (shrink)

Since Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” the myth of the Given has been central to philosophical discussions of perceptual experience and knowledge. In its most prominent form, the idea of the Given is the idea that perceptual experience can rationally support one’s thoughts but has no conceptual content. Now, intentional action is widely thought to be the structural complement of perceptual experience; via perceptual experience, the world impresses itself on the mind; via intentional action, the mind impresses (...) itself on the world. But if that is true, we should suspect that there is something structurally similar to the idea of the Given in our thinking about intentional action. In this essay, I show in detail that indeed there is. Roughly, it is the idea that intentional actions can be rationally supported by one’s thoughts but have no conceptual content. I contend further that if the Given is a “myth,” so too is this structural analog. I also argue that if John McDowell’s way of avoiding the Given is satisfactory, there is a correlative way of avoiding the structural analog. The intriguing result: intentional action must have conceptual content. In the end, I raise two key questions about whether we should accept this result. (shrink)

I will analyse some properties of abduction that are essential from a logical standpoint. When dealing with the so-called ‘inferential problem’, I will opt for the more general concepts of input and output instead of those of premisses and conclusions, and show that in this framework two consequences can be derived that help clarify basic logical aspects of abductive reasoning: (i) it is more natural to accept the ‘multimodal’ and ‘context-dependent’ character of the inferences involved, (ii) inferences are not merely (...) conceived of in the terms of the process leading to the ‘generation of an output’ or to the proof of it, as in the traditional and standard view of deductive proofs, but rather, from this perspective abductive inferences can be seen as related to logical processes in which input and output fail to hold each other in an expected relation, with the solution involving the modification of inputs, not that of outputs. I will also describe that if we wish to naturalize the logic of the abductive processes and its special consequence relation, we should refer to the following main aspects: ‘optimization of situatedness’, ‘maximization of changeability’ of both input and output, and high ‘information-sensitiveness’. (shrink)

In his Locke Lectures Brandom proposes to extend what he calls the project of analysis to encompass various relationships between meaning and use. As the traditional project of analysis sought to clarify various logical relations between vocabularies so Brandom’s extended project seeks to clarify various pragmatically mediated semantic relations between vocabularies. The point of the exercise in both cases is to achieve what Brandom thinks of as algebraic understanding. Because the pragmatist critique of the traditional project of analysis was precisely (...) to deny that such understanding is appropriate to the case of natural language, the very idea of an analytic pragmatism is called into question by that critique. My aim is to clarify the prospects for Brandom’s project, or at least something in the vicinity of that project, through a comparison of it with what I will suggest we can think of as Kant’s analytic pragmatism as developed by Peirce. (shrink)

The truth-condition theory of meaning is, naturally, thought of an as explanatory theory whose explananda are the meaning facts. But there are at least two deductive arguments that purport to establish the truth of the theory irrespective of its explanatory virtues. This paper examines those arguments and concludes that they succeed.

In Thinking like a Mall Steven Vogel argues that there is no authoritative nature independent of human standards to which one can appeal to correct damaging environmental practices. Human practices are the only basis for interpreting the environment and our ecologically destructive practices have made our environment into the degraded thing that it is. Revising these flawed practices requires becoming alienated from them; only then can we be responsible for them. Alienation is overcome by a democratic community who chooses the (...) practices that correct deficient ones and that we can recognise as expressions of ourselves and be at home in. This paper argues that there is a key step missing in this process, which is how we become alienated from our practices. It is only by appreciating the broader social and institutional horizon, ‘Ethical Life’, by which norms receive their authority and lose it, that we can understand alienation and the normative change necessary to correct it. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to defend the inferentialist conception ofqualiaintrospection against some apparently decisive objections. According to inferentialism, a self-attribution of a qualitative state is to be understood as the conclusion of an inference, rather than as issuing from an experience of a specific kind. It has been objected that formally correct inferences warranting introspective conclusions are simply not to be found. I concede this point, but maintain that inferentialism should not be abandoned. Some deductive inferences are correct (...) because of the contents of the concepts which occur in them, rather than in virtue of their logical form. I claim that this is what happens for introspective inferences: they are materially correct because ofa prioriconceptual liaisons linking the concept of a conscious experience with a certain class of demonstrative concepts. (shrink)

In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them 'practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I (...) introduce the basic ideas and motives behind some practice-based theories of meaning, and offer some reasons why an eliminativist, non-quietist, epistemic practice-based approach to meaning that 1) disavows any explanatory role for the linguistic community as such, 2) prioritizes sentence meaning over word meaning, and 3) may , in the end, be naturalistic, should be favored over its practice-based competitors. (shrink)

I outline Brandom’s theory of de re and de dicto belief ascriptions, which plays a central role in Brandom’s overall theory of linguistic communication, and show that this theory offers a surprising, new response to Burge’s (Midwest Stud 6:73–121, 1979) argument for social externalism. However, while this response is in principle available from the perspective of Brandom’s theory of belief ascription in abstraction from his wider theoretical enterprise, it ceases to be available from this perspective in the wider context of (...) his inferential role semantics and his doctrines of scorekeeping and of the expressive role of belief ascriptions in discourse. In this wider context, Brandom’s theory of belief ascriptions implies that Burge’s argument trivially fails to have the disquieting implications for psychological explanations that it is widely taken to have. Yet since this is not trivially so, Brandom’s theory apparently provides a false picture of our practice of interpreting belief ascriptions. I then argue that Brandom might as well accept the alternative picture of interpreting belief ascriptions that Burge’s argument presupposes: even in the context of his overall project, Brandom’s take on our practice of interpreting them does not afford belief ascriptions with the discursive significance Brandom claims they have. (shrink)

Counterpossibles are counterfactuals that involve some metaphysical impossibility. Modal normativism is a non-descriptivist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility according to which modal claims, e.g. ‘necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried’, do not function as descriptive claims about the modal nature of reality but function as normative illustrations of constitutive rules and permissions that govern the use of ordinary non-modal vocabulary, e.g. ‘bachelor’. In this paper, I assume modal normativism and develop a novel account of counterpossibles and claims about metaphysical similarity (...) between possible and impossible worlds. I argue that considerations of metaphysical similarity between various impossible worlds and the actual world only require us to tacitly consider how the actual constitutive rules that govern the use of our terms change in order to accommodate the description of some hypothetical impossible scenario. I then argue for my account by raising worries for alternative epistemic and realist accounts of counterpossibles and showing how my account avoids those worries. (shrink)

This article examines genealogical investigations in an attempt to explain what they are, how they work, and what purpose they serve. It is a critique of Robert Brandom’s view of genealogists as naïve semanticists who believe that normative thinking, as it relates to all forms of epistemic inquiry and language use, is reducible to naturalistic causes. This reduction, Brandom claims, is hopelessly misguided and semantically incoherent since genealogies are not epistemically neutral in that “they count no more and no less,” (...) as Habermas put it, than the traditional accounts of moral phenomena that they seek to replace. Nietzsche’s “story” of the origin of guilt in On the Genealogy of Morals is thus not even a useful fiction but merely meaningless. My analysis shows that Brandom’s understanding of genealogy is rather simplistic. While genealogists are naturalists insofar as they attempt to discover the specific historical causes that gave rise to current normative practices, they are neither reductive empiricists nor first-stage semanticists, as Brandom calls them, but multidimensional power-pragmatists. (shrink)

This article grapples with Robert Brandom’s account of singular terms. I argue that neither Brandom’s answer to the question “What are singular terms?” nor his answer to the question “Why are there any singular terms?” works as they currently stand. Brandom’s substitution-inferential semantic account of what singular terms are fails to distinguish between the semantic role of singular terms and indefinite descriptions, and Brandom’s “expressive transcendental deduction” for why there are any singular terms fails to deciseively show that singular terms (...) are expressively necessary for the use of logical vocabulary. Still, I then characterize how Brandom does have resources within his substitution-inferential semantics to give a better, revised answer to the question “What are singular terms?” that both fits programmatically within his framework and has a curious Kantian parallel. I leave the matter offering a Brandom-friendly replacement account for why there are any singular terms thus conceived for another occasion. (shrink)

In order to develop his pragmatist and inferentialist framework, Robert Brandom appropriates, reconstructs and revises key themes in German Idealism such as the self-legislation of norms, the social institution of concepts and facts, a norm-oriented account of being and the critique of representationalist accounts of meaning and truth. However, these themes have an essential ethical dimension, one that Brandom has not explicitly acknowledged. For Hegel, the determination of norms and facts and the institution of normative statuses take place in the (...) context of Sittlichkeit (‘ethical life’). By engaging with some of the more ontologically and ethically substantive points raised by Hegel, I argue that, from a Hegelian perspective, Brandom’s project regarding the social determination of truth and meaning cannot be divorced from ethics, specifically, the ethical dimension of social recognition. Furthermore, I argue that, in real situations (as opposed to ideal ones), claims to normative authority cannot be considered independently from the legitimacy of those claims, a legitimacy that Brandom is unable to reasonably explain. Finally, I argue that a Hegelian solution to the problems facing Brandom’s framework calls into question the unity of reason that is at the core of Brandom’s normative pragmatics and inferential semantics. (shrink)

Are there sensory states that, unlike mere sensory registrations, require an explanatory framework that goes beyond biology? Based on a reconstruction of Kant’s a priori, transcendental psychology, contemporary Kantians answer this question in the positive but dramatically limit the scope of psychology. In contrast, naturalistically oriented deflationists answer it in the negative, thereby not giving psychology any explanatory role whatsoever. In his recent monumental book Origins of Objectivity, Burge argues against both of these approaches and seeks to develop an intermediate (...) approach between them. This he does by embedding Kantian transcendental psychology in contemporary science of perception, thereby naturalizing the former and considerably broadening the scope of psychology. In this paper I critically examine Burge’s naturalized Kantianism, thereby defending transcendental Kantianism. To this end, I first outline Kantian transcendental psychology of perception, highlighting the features that distinguish it from biology. I then show how Burge naturalizes this psychology by embedding its most fundamental notions in contemporary science of perception. Based on all this, I conclude the paper by arguing for two closely related claims. First, that transformed into empirical psychology, Kantian transcendental psychology loses the features that distinguish it from biology. Second, that genuine perception starts at the high cognitive level for which transcendental psychology accounts and not at the rather low or elementary level on which Burge focuses. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against Brandom's two-ply theory of action. For Brandom, action is the result of an agent acknowledging a practical commitment and then causally responding to that commitment by acting. Action is social because the content of the commitment upon which one acts is socially conferred in the game of giving and asking for reasons. On my proposal, instead of seeing action as the coupling of a rational capacity to acknowledge commitments and a non-rational capacity to reliably (...) respond to these commitments, we should see action as the coupling, or potential coupling, of a capacity to reason practically and a capacity to act on habits and bodily skills. In putting forward this alternative model of action, I aim to replace Brandom's rationalist brand of Pragmatism with a more classical kind, one that will let us see action as social not only at the level of reasons but also at the level of bodily habits and skills. (shrink)

We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of proceeding is more or less the first and his is more or less the second. But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start. Our problem is that we don’t know what “you start with” means either in formulations like “you start with the content of words and proceed to the (...) content of sentences” or in formulations like “you start with the content of sentences and you proceed to the content of words.” Brandom’s official view seems to be that he’s talking about explanatory priorities (see the preceding quote); but we think that can’t really be what he has in mind, and we can’t find any alternative interpretation that seems plausible. Speaking just for ourselves, we’re inclined towards a relatively pragmatic view of explanation; what explanation we should “start with” depends, inter alia, on what it’s an explanation of and whom it’s an explanation for. But, in any case, we would have thought that explanatory priority is of more than heuristic interest only if it reflects a priority of some other kind: ontological, semantical, psychological, or whatever. In talking about what one “starts with”, Brandom must be claiming more than. (shrink)

This work sets out to present how the notion of delusion may be understood (and extended) within the semantic framework of Robert Brandom's inferentialism. The mechanisms of reliability and community‐oriented proprieties, among others, provide inferentialists with effective tools for understanding commitments (and so beliefs) in communities. These tools may be used to describe and assess both commitments that we might consider sound and commitments that we might consider delusional, both in terms of how they arise and in terms of how (...) they may be reinforced. Delusions are accordingly rendered in perspectival and normative terms, which is elaborated through a number of examples. The picture of how a delusional commitment may be understood, how it may be reinforced, and its character as community internal or external provide some interesting perspectives on delusions in shared social contexts, as well as how they may originate intractable conflicts and disconnects between sub‐groups within a broader linguistic community. (shrink)

Philosophical discussion of truthmaking has flourished in recent times, but what exactly does it mean to ‘make’ a truth-bearer true? I argue that ‘making’ is a concept with modal force, and this renders it a problematic deployment for truthmaker theorists with nominalist sympathies, which characterises most current theories. I sketch the outlines of what I argue is a more genuinely realist truthmaker theory, which is capable of answering the explanatory question: In virtue of what does each particular truthmaker make its (...) particular truthbearer(s) true? I do this by drawing on recent work by Frederik Stjernfelt on Charles Peirce’s account of the proposition as having a ‘particular double structure’, according to which a proposition not only depicts certain characters of an object, it also depicts itself claiming those characters to pertain to the object. This double structure, I shall argue, also resolves important issues in analytic philosophers’ truthmaker theory, including the proper distinction between reference and truthmaking, and a dilemma concerning an infinite regress of truthmaking. (shrink)

Mental representations—like many other things—seem to have parts. However, it isn’t clear how to properly understand the idea of a part of a representation. In this paper I shed new light on how representations can have a mereology. In particular, it has been recognized that there is a mereological element to Kant’s distinction between two kinds of representations: intuitions and concepts. A concept depends upon its parts, whereas an intuition is prior to its parts. The paper thus focuses on an (...) exploration of how to make sense of the parts and wholes of intuitions and concepts. (shrink)

On Brandom’s view, we can understand objectivity in terms of the view that what is objectively correct potentially transcends any given attitude. But Levine challenges this view. He distinguishes between two questions of objectivity: ‘How do we grasp the concept of objectivity?’ and ‘What determines the difference between what is correct and what is merely taken to be correct?’ And he argues that Brandom’s account of objectivity fails to address the second question of objectivity. Furthermore, based on classical pragmatist views, (...) he defends an alternative account, which he calls ‘an experiential-theoretical account of objectivity’. I agree with Levine that Brandom’s structural account of objectivity can hardly answer the second question of objectivity. In this paper, however, I argue that we can answer the second question of objectivity without accepting Levine’s claim that experience has a rational bearing on the contents of empirical thoughts. (shrink)

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant’s view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, (...) but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections. (shrink)

Robert Brandom argues for a “pragmatic phenomenalist account” of knowledge. On this account, we should understand our notion of justification in accordance with a Sellarsian social practice model, and there is nothing more to the phenomenon of knowledge than the proprieties of takings-as-knowing. I agree with these two claims. But Brandom's proposal is so sketchy that it is unclear how it can deal with a number of much-discussed problems in contemporary epistemology. The main purpose of this article is to develop (...) and defend a pragmatic phenomenalist account of knowledge by resolving those problems. I argue, in particular, that this account can accommodate both the lesson of the Gettier problem and the lesson of reliabilism simultaneously. -/- RÉSUMÉ: Robert Brandom soutient une «théorie pragmatique et phénomenaliste» de la connaissance. Selon cette théorie, nous devons comprendre notre notion de justification d'après un modèle sellarsien de la pratique sociale, et il n'y a rien d'autre dans phénomène de connaissance que la pertinence de «prendre-pour-connaître». Je suis tout à fait d'accord avec ces deux opinions. Mais la thèse de Brandom est si sommaire qu'il n'est pas évident de savoir comment elle peut trailer les nombreux problèmes discutés en épistémologie contemporaine. Le but principal de cet article est de développer et défendre une théorie pragmatique et phénomenaliste de la connaissance en résolvant ces problèmes. Je soutiens, en particulier, que cette théorie peut s'accorder en même temps à lerçon du problème de Gettier et au «fiabilisme». (shrink)

According to the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the application of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the norms governing its application. But this view faces some serious objections. In particular, according to Rosen, Glüer and Wikforss, this view leads to a vicious regress of norms. The purpose of this paper is to defend a version of the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts (...) against this objection. I argue that we can deal with this problem along the lines of a coherentist account of justification. (shrink)

The problem of epistemic circularity involved in justifying fundamental epistemic principles is one of the fundamental problems of epistemology. One important way out of this problem is a Sellarsian social practice theory of justification, according to which we are justified in accepting an epistemic principle if we can answer all objections raised against it in our social practice of demanding justification and responding to such demands. The main goal of this paper is to show that this social practice theory can (...) accomplish better than its rival theories, such as Alston’s doxastic practice approach, Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology, and Wright’s entitlement theory, by making comparisons with these influential theories. (shrink)

In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they commit him to an “ecumenical historicism” (...) that is directly at odds with the hermeneutic approach. Although the variety of de re interpretation that Brandom denominates de traditione comes indeed very close to the Gadamerian approach, I conclude that if Brandomian scorekeepers were to adopt it, they could become Gadamerian hermeneuts, but once they did, they would not be able to go back to their scorekeeping practices as described by Brandom. (shrink)

We argue that probability mistakes indicate that at least some of us often do not adequately possess the concept of probability (and its cognates) and that the digital dissemination of such misinfo...

This article tackles the problem of normativity in naturalism and considers it in the context of the philosophy of historiography. I argue that strong naturalism is inconsistent with genuine normat...

This essay first traces change in, roughly, the epistemology of the humanities from the 1950s to the 21st century. The second section looks at how the meaning and options in moral philosophy altered in more or less the same period. The last and easily most speculative section examines how these changes permeated American culture, and how professional philosophers responded to the challenges of the new political world they inhabited.

In the past, Robert Brandom’s philosophy has provided fruitful grounds for the development of an approach to the history of philosophy. In A Spirit of Trust (2019), however, this approach takes a new form; one that corresponds to a shift of focus in Brandom’s philosophy, from his earlier inferentialism to its later developments in the thesis of rational recollection. This article aims to elucidate and explicate this new approach, which Brandom refers to as forgiveness. By looking into the thesis of (...) rational recollection, the article examines the back-looking attitude that Brandom argues for and how it can be applied to past philosophy. To better understand the novelty of this approach as forgiveness, the article considers other names that Brandom ascribes to this process, which interestingly correspond to different genres in the historiography of philosophy. Lastly, the article discusses whether such a forgiving approach leaves room for criticism and mistakes. (shrink)

Can we learn something interesting about knowledge by examining our concept of knowledge? Quite a bit, many argue. My own view, however, is that the concept of knowledge is of little epistemological interest. In this paper, I critically examine one particularly interesting defense of the view that the concept of knowledge is of great epistemological interest: Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. A minimalist view about the value of examining our concept of knowledge is defended.

Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can move beyond (...) these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another. (shrink)

Inquiry into the history of practices in the manner of Foucault's philosophical genealogy requires that we distinguish between practical action, on the one hand, and mere behavior, on the other. The need for this distinction may help explicate an aspect of Foucault's philosophical genealogy that might otherwise appear misplaced, namely his attention to rationalities and its attendant conceptual material. This article shows how a genealogical attention to practice goes hand in hand with an attention to the role of the conceptual (...) within our practices. This is done by first drawing on considerations furnished by a Wittgensteinean branch in analytic philosophy recently developed by Robert Brandom. With an account of conceptual normativity and reflexivity in hand, the article turns second to a crucial site of conceptual self-transformation by drawing on work from a particular Foucauldian lineage developed in the work of Arnold Davidson. Davidson's work helps us understand the crucial status of concepts of persons for any historical inquiry into practices. (shrink)

This article investigates the concept and the construction of judicial discretion. The strengths and weaknesses of both Dworkin and Hart are analysed, and in view of these, it is argued that a full picture of judicial discretion is between the two extremes. Thus, a moderate theory of judicial discretion is maintained which is based on achievements by Robert Alexy (2002b). The article develops a balancing model of discretion and relates it to the theory of legal argumentation. The limits of discretion (...) and the relation between structural (strong) and epistemic (weak) discretion are addressed in detail, both with illustrations from the jurisdiction of the German Federal Constitutional Court. (shrink)

What is the core of legal scholarship? How can we understand its relation to other disciplines, such as moral and political philosophy, sociology, and economics? I explore these questions by analysing the impact of the dual nature thesis. Criticising established theories of legal scholarship, I defend the ideal of an integrative jurisprudence. Integrative jurisprudence combines the two dimensions of law by employing analytical, empirical, and normative methods. I then discuss three objections and address the problem of how to bridge is (...) and ought. In the course of my analysis of three different bridge theories, I ultimately further develop the dual nature thesis into a triadic nature thesis. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory is becoming an all-encompassing form of explanation in many branches of philosophy. However, emergence theory uses the concept of self-organization to support yet alter traditional evolutionary explanation. Biologist Stuart Kauffman suggests that the new science will need to tell stories, not simply as a heuristic device but as part of its fundamental task. This claim is reminiscent of C. S. Peirce’s criticism of the doctrine of necessity. Peirce’s suggestions reference Hegel, and this essay draws out this Hegelian background. (...) In particular, it addresses the question of subjectivity and issues some Hegelian reminders so that such evolutionary and emergent theories will consider the implication of this research program on philosophy of mind. The essay focuses primarily on two post-Kantian, neo-Hegelian thinkers in contemporary philosophy who deal with this problem: John McDowell and Robert Brandom. (shrink)

A key requirement for the automatic generation of argumentative or explanatory text is to present the constituent propositions in an order that readers will find coherent and natural, to increase the likelihood that they will understand and accept the author’s claims. Natural language generation systems have standardly employed a repertoire of coherence relations such as those defined by Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Structure Theory. This paper models the generation of persuasive monologue as the outcome of an “inner dialogue”, where the (...) author attempts to anticipate potential challenges or clarification requests. It is argued that certain RST relations such as Motivate, Evidence and Concession can be seen to emerge from various pre-empting strategies. (shrink)

There was a time when meta-ethical expressivism seemed to be the only game in town for meta-ethical non-representationalists. In recent years, though, meta-ethical inferentialism has emerged as a promising non-representationalist alternative. So far, however, inferentialists lack something that would really allow them to draw level with expressivists. This is an explanation for the distinctive difference between normative and descriptive vocabulary when it comes to disagreement—something expressivists can explain in terms of the difference between representational and desire-like states and which constitutes (...) one of the primary motivations for expressivism. This paper develops a novel and distinctive account for this difference on behalf of inferentialists, based on the different functions of these two vocabularies. Not only does this account help inferentialists, it also shows how non-representionalist accounts can capture the relevant disagreement phenomena without appealing to the sorts of desire-like states expressivists tend to appeal to. (shrink)

The underconsideration argument against inference to the best explanation and scientific realism holds that scientists are not warranted in inferring that the best theory is true, because scientists only ever conceive of a small handful of theories at one time, and as a result, they may not have considered a true theory. However, antirealists have not developed a detailed alternative account of why explanatory inference nevertheless appears so central to scientific practice. In this paper, I provide new defences against some (...) recent objections to the underconsideration argument, while also developing an account of explanatory inference that both survives these criticisms and does not entail realism. (shrink)

Nous montrons dans cet article comment les approches dynamiques en logique contemporaine ont retrouvé, quoique sous d ’ autres attendus, une configuration théorique qu ’ on peut attribuer à Aristote au moment de la rédaction des Topiques. Dans cette configuration, la logique et la rhétorique – ou au moins la dialectique – se complètent dans le cadre conceptuel homogène offert par la dialectique, entendue comme une certaine forme relativement codifiée de débat critique. L ’ idée principale est qu ’ aujourd (...) ’ hui, de même qu ’ alors, la dialectique est le cadre dans lequel il est possible de penser le rapport entre la logique et les formes générales de l ’ argumentation d ’ une part, et entre la logique et la théorie de la connaissance scientifique d ’ autre part. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well explained by this explanatory framework? This article provides a novel response to this enduring objection. First, following Brandom, it is suggested that, to understand the normativity of intentional states, we should countenance and distinguish between two normative categories of commitment and entitlement, only the former of which is argued to be essential (...) for intentional explanations. Conflating these two normative dimensions is noted to be one of the main sources of the objections leveled against the view. Second, it is shown that the committive dimension is rich and flexible enough to accommodate all the apparently problematic cases. (shrink)

In what sense can one claim that intentional explanations are essentially normative, given that people’s actions and thinking are replete with various irrationalities, yet are still pretty well exp...